ColdFusion Alive

Igor Ilyinsky talks about “Breaking out of your ColdFusion comfort zone (How to make CF mainstream)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

CF from a biz perspective

When CF makes sense or not makes sense for a biz

When works, not work

Dev cost

Maintenance costs

How hard to hire good CF devs

When pick CF

How big the project is

How much fits our existing CF code base

Client preference

When pick WP

If just CMS and blog

When other languages

If have existing package in that language

CF Obstacles

CF was the lowest barrier to learn

Blessing and curse

Blessing - easy to create new apps

Curse - some bad developers have written bad quality code

Now some languages you don’t have to set up a server to use it

Cloud spin up instant in

cPanel setup

Node.js

CF setup improvements

Dockerization

CommandBox

Silent CF traditional installs

CF Benefits

Rapid Application Development

Esp for occasional coders or new coders

Strong CF community

New innovation

Docker

Cloud

“Future proof”

Modules (Forgebox)

Plug in risk that the developer wrote good code

Cost of license is small compared to cost of the code

Plenty of high quality CF devs

Closed platform is more security than open source

State of CF Union survey

Most CF devs have done for a long time

Need more young CFers

Adobe CF education version

Adobe free college training materials

How get kids and younger people into it

Entrepreneurs putting up a simple app

Adobe priority on CF?

Compare to Google and Node.js

Engage community more to develop language features that they want

Collaborative with community

Tag line - for everything you want to build on the web

Politics of why technolicals CF connects with

Stumbling blocks for CF gaining mainstream status

CF community to provide sample code to services and APIs that work with multiple languages

Maybe a central list or repository of these!

Just in time component incorporation of parts of the CF server

Pay for support subscription vs the platform up front

Lightweight platform footprint

Engage programmers of other languages such as JavaScript

CF devs largely operate in a bubble

Exposed to other languages and techniques

Stepping out of your CF comfort zone

Engage other technologies

Docker

AWS

Make these more turnkey for CFers to use

Getting more news and PR for CF scaling and security

How Igor got started with CF

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?

Mentioned in this episode

WannaCry ransomware 

State of CF Union survey results 2018 blog post

The Future of ColdFusion (it is Bright) with Tridib Roy Chowdhury

Episode Thomas Grobicki 041 The true ROI of ColdFusion (how to sell CF to your boss or client)

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Igor Ilyinsky

Igor is the founder of FirmWise, and has helped redesign over a hundred law firm websites. He is a Marketing Technologist, Entrepreneur and entertaining presenter focused on advancing Law Firms to the highest level of marketing technology automation… Igor's gift is knowing how to translate techy jargon into common sense English that anyone can understand; even battle hardened attorneys. His experience in web development for nearly the past two decades and his popularity as a speaker make him the quintessential authority on what trends to pursue and what fads to avoid. As the Founder of FirmWise, the only web hosting platform developed specifically for law firms, Igor has helped define the web presence for over 200 law firms, and continues to pioneer strategy for the industry.

Specialties: Expertise in Law Firm Marketing, Web Content Management, ColdFusion, Web Hosting, Web Design, Database Architecture, IT Management and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Worked with numerous programming languages (including: Basic, Fortran, Pascal, Modula3, C/C++, Visual Basic, Active Server Pages, Java, Java Server Pages, Enterprise Java Beans, JavaScript, Livewire [Server Side JavaScript], Perl, Php, SQL, TSQL, PL/SQL, ColdFusion, ActionScript, WML, WMLS, XML and WSDL) on multiple OS platforms.

Links

Twitter

LinkedIn

FirmWise

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:00

Welcome back to the show. And today we're looking at breaking out of your cold fusion comfort zone and how to make cold fusion mainstream with ego Alinsky. And we'll look at cold fusion from a business perspective when it works when it doesn't work when it makes sense or not obstacles, benefits of cold fusion, stumbling blocks for cold fusion, gaining mainstream status, and how you might be operating in a bubble using cold fusion, and how you can step out of your comfort zone to do that. So welcome, Eagle.

Igor Ilyinsky 0:32

Thanks for having me.

Michaela 0:35

Oh, you're so welcome. And in case you don't know him, he's been in the cold fusion community for a long time. And he's the founder of firm wise and that company designs lot hundreds of websites for law firms. So

so he's been doing he uses cold fusion for that. And he's been doing it for over 10 years. So let's just come back to that first point. Kofi from a business perspective, because so often we just look at programming languages from a technology perspective. But what do you think of cold fusion from a business perspective

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Mark Drew talks about “Planning for CFML ISP disaster (Commandbox and Docker to the rescue)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

"Challenge, a current client was planning for Disaster Recovery environments but disaster nearly struck due to the requirement of the ISP to move the servers!"

Show notes

Funtimes in deploying real projects

“Your mission, Mark, should you decide to accept it, is… As usual, should you or any member of your I.M. Force be captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Mark.”

Background:

Real client that is moving from big hosted tin to a more elastic solution

Temporal variations in requirements. ASide from busy seasons we have Weekends!

All the environments were different too. So we needed a way to have *SOME* standardization

Vagrant vs Single instances vs Clusters, Railo vs Lucee

5 instances  per machine

5 machines

Dedicated across clients

Range of different machines such as windows , linux, PHP, Java and even InDesign running batch scripts.

Started out as a disaster recovery project but as ISP needed to move the client out it has turned into a full cloud implementation

Several Terabytes of image files for example

Build Workflow

Providers

Gitlab

Can script deployment pipelines

Jenkins

Issue can not script your deployment process

Bitbucket

Stages

CommandBox Pre-Commit Hooks

Testbox

Cflint

Docker image creation successful

CommandBox Post commit builds

External testing

Load testing

JMeter

Submitting to your docker repository

Different docker images?

Test vs Normal

2. Docker Server Monitor

Fusion Reactor and FusionReactor Cloud by Integral

3. Artefact Caching

Build times

4. Logging

Getting the right data

ELK (The Open Source Elastic Stack)

ElasticSearch

Logstash

Kibana

JournalD

5. Configs Live/Dev/Test

6. Central Session Storage

CFConfig (CommandBox feature)

Servers Environment Variables (Production etc)

Generic names eg database for db server

Resource domain names

Create Aliases for them

Handle them with hosts files

memcached/redis to store sessions

7. Load Balancing and Orchestration

Round Robin load balancing

Portainer

Kubernetes

Docker Compose and Swarm

Elastic Container Service AWS

8. Data Changes / Workflow

Some solutions:

CFMigrations - Eric Peterson

Versioning of database

QueryBuilder (Fluent Query Builder for CFML)  - Eric Peterson

Currently using hand crafted SQL files (can be run multiple times)

First time alters the columns

Second time updates data

9. Dependency Trees of Docker

CommandBox handles this

10. Hard Stuff

Only one copy of each Scheduled Tasks runs

Canary Deployments

Green Blue Deployments

Service Url for health of the app.

Why are you proud to use CFML?

WWIT for you to make CFML more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at ITB?

His podcast Localhost.fm

Mentioned in this episode

Mission Impossible Intro 

Gitlab

Jenkins

Bitbucket

Testbox

cflint

CommandBox

Docker

CF Alive Docker episodes

Getting Started Fast with Docker, with Mark Drew

Secrets From the Folks Who Make the Official Lucee CFML Docker Images, with Geoff Bowers

Using Portainer.io (Docker Container Management) with Neil Cresswell

066 The Docker Revolution for Faster ColdFusion Development (and Easier DevOps) with Bret Fisher

071 ContentBox in the Cloud (Docker Magic) with Gavin Pickin

JMeter

ELK (The Open Source Elastic Stack)

ElasticSearch

Logstash

Kibana

JournalD

Kubernetes

CFMigrations by Eric Peterson

QueryBuilder (Fluent Query Builder for CFML)  by Eric Peterson

Portainer

Portainer episode

Rancher

ForgeBox

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Mark Drew

Mark Drew has been programming CFML since 1996, and even though he has had forays into Perl, ASP and PHP he is still loving every line of code he has crafted with CFML. His career has concentrated on eCommerce, Content Management and Application Scalability for various well known brands in the UK market such as Jaeger, Hackett, Hobbs, Dyson, B&W, Diesel amongst others.

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mark Drew, otherwise known as the amazing CFO from London.

Mark Drew 0:09

There's only one of us in London.

Michaela 0:12

Anyone know there's hundreds and hundreds of London? Yes. And he's the director of web development at CMT, which is a web development shop, I believe in the UK

in Greenwich. Yes, he got Greenwich Mean Time, exactly down and he's also the co host of a new podcast called local host. So check that out. So I'll put the link in the show notes to that.

So today we're looking at how CFS can get started fast with Docker and we're going to look at what a Docker container is and why everyone listening should care about that the challenges they overcome Docker versus vagrant, even controversially, our traditional I ISP, he's going to go away if Docker gets its way and how they compare the virtual machines. How you can get started with the Docker engine.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Raymond Camden talks about “Progressive Web Apps (A Gentle Intro for CFers who are scared of PWAs)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. By our nature web developers are prone to anxiety.

Show notes

What is a Progressive Web App (PWA) from a high level

The next level from Web 2.0

“Progressive Web Apps are user experiences that have the reach of the web, and are:

Reliable - Load instantly and never show the downasaur, even in uncertain network conditions.

Fast - Respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.

Engaging - Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.”

What is a PWA in more detail?

A Progressive Web App is:

Progressive

- Works for every user, regardless of browser choice because it's built with progressive enhancement as a core tenet.

Responsive

- Fits any form factor: desktop, mobile, tablet, or whatever is next.

Connectivity independent

- Enhanced with service workers to work offline or on low-quality networks.

App-like

- Feels like an app, because the app shell model separates the application functionality from application content .

Fresh

- Always up-to-date thanks to the service worker update process.

Safe

- Served via HTTPS to prevent snooping and to ensure content hasn't been tampered with.

Discoverable

- Is identifiable as an "application" thanks to W3C manifest and service worker registration scope, allowing search engines to find it.

Re-engageable

- Makes re-engagement easy through features like push notifications.

Installable

- Allows users to add apps they find most useful to their home screen without the hassle of an app store.

Linkable

- Easily share the application via URL, does not require complex installation.

(from https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/ )

Why care?

Better UX, more engagement, more ad revenue or sales

How compare to a native app

Easier to build

Very easy to install (just go to the website link!)

Cross device on release

Not for complex

Progressive - grac

Background sync

Push notifications

How different from Responsive web apps?

Progressive apps are responsive with other features too

Famous Examples

Uber - runs great even on 2G networks

tech details https://eng.uber.com/m-uber/

Pinterest - user engagement time up 40%, ad revenue up 44%

Tech details https://medium.com/dev-channel/a-pinterest-progressive-web-app-performance-case-study-3bd6ed2e6154

Tinder - 90% reduction in download size

Tech details  https://medium.com/@addyosmani/a-tinder-progressive-web-app-performance-case-study-78919d98ece0

Forbes - content load time down from 6.5 to 2.5 seconds, 40% increase in user engagement

Tech details https://digiday.com/media/new-mobile-site-forbes-boosted-impressions-per-session-10-percent/

What is the preferred way of building a PWA?

Uses Mobile chrome features

Frameworks

Bootstrap for the responsive part

Offline libraries for connectivity independence

What are you looking forward to at ITB?

Mentioned in this episode

https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/

PWAstats.com

Chrome User Experience report (CrUX)

Brad Wood CommandBox episode

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Raymond Camden

Raymond Camden is a senior developer advocate for Auth0 Extend. His work focuses on Extend, serverless customization, and the web in general. He's a published author and presents at conferences and user groups on a variety of topics. Raymond can be reached at his blog (www.raymondcamden.com), @raymondcamden on Twitter, or via email at [email protected].

Interview Transcript:

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show today we're talking about progressive web apps, something that you might have been afraid of. But after this gentle introduction from Ray Camden, you are going to be all over them. And he's going to be speaking at into the box about this topic, and very excited to have him if you're not sure what a progressive web app is, will go into that. But it seems to be reliable, fast, engaging,

connectivity, independent, responsive, all kinds of good things will go into the details of what it is what technologies you might use to make it appear in your web app. So and if you don't know, Ray is the sub in senior developer advocate for off zero, extend. And he works on extend and service customization and a web in general. And he talks at all kinds of conferences, as well as into the box. So welcome, Ray. Thank you.

Raymond Camden 1:12

Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Always a delight. So what exactly is a web app, progressive web app progress, high level my level. So it is basically a set of expectations, certain functionality, I like to think of it, think of it like we used to think of web two point O web two point O was a big marketing term, like four or five years ago. And there were certain expectations about what a web two point O app was. It uses Ajax, and pretty much that was it.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Jeffrey Kunkel talks about “Oh my GAD (General Anxiety Disorder)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

By our nature web developers are prone to anxiety. Web development takes a monumental dedication to continuing education, networking, and being an expert source for many of your coworkers. Learning to manage stress early can be one of the most indispensable skills for a long healthy career in web development. Be it FOMO, Impostor Syndrome, Analysis Paralysis, or just generally feeling overwhelmed, developers of all levels can benefit from learning to take a step back and allow themselves to relax and be productive.

I will focus on my perspective of being a web developer with anxiety in today's web development world. I'll talk about using "Fake it 'till you make it" philosophy to help combat the anxiety of keeping up with the ever evolving web. I also plan to delve into "Impostor Syndrome," and more specifically how to foster self confidence in your ability without cultivating an ego. By the end of my talk I'd like people to leave with the stress management skills and frame of mind to increase their productivity and overall job satisfaction.

This talk is ideal for developers feeling the weight of career and having stress and anxiety productivity issues.QB

Show notes

Why this matters to all CF Developers

20% of general population

60% of CFers sometimes have Anxiety Disorder

Introverts

Stressful profession

Anxiety

Stress → bad for health and happiness

Can follow you home

Can lead to suicide

Bad for productivity

FOMO

Impostor Syndrome

Late to Git

Fear of being accused of being a fake, not knowing the topic

Just start learning it

Ok to admit you don’t know something and learn it

Stackoverflow

CF slack channel

Google

Ask

Impossible to know everything about everything in full stack development

Self confidence in your ability without cultivating an ego

Remember what it was like to be new to this

Analysis Paralysis

Overwhelm

Too many tasks to do

Lack of priorities

Planning up front save time in the end

Lots of tabs → more anxiety and distractions

Turn of speakers - so chat notification don’t interrupt my train of thought

Perfectionism

Adding bells and whistles to code

Ok to come back to less important issues later (add to todo list)

Limited perfection to top priority issue

Is anxiety all bad

Advantage of double checking

OCD = Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Interruptions → anxiety spikes

Save where you where

Todoist note

Git Stash

Self medication

Alcohol

Food

Caffeine

Can be bad for your health

Negative feedback loop

Conferences

Alcohol

Stress management skills

Take a break

Wrist tracker reminder

Deep, slow breathing

Yoga

Reach out to developer friends and CF Community

Getting Things Done method

Music while I work

Turn off sound notifications on computer and phone

Mindsets

"Fake it 'till you make it" philosophy

You never learn if you panic before you start

CF Community

Standing desk

Exercise

Sleep

Naps

Earlier to bed vs later getting up

Less Caffeine

Family time

Female CFers more anxiety

Talk about your anxiety

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Mentioned in this episode

CF Suicide episode

Into The Box Conference

Todoist

Getting Things Done book by Dave Allen

Introverts guide to conferences article

Getting Real with Women in Tech with April Graves 

Brain.fm

Melatonin

Railo

Lucee

Node.js

JSconf

CFObjective

Tech Has an Anxiety Problem. This CEO Is Working to Combat It

STRESS & ANXIETY IN THE TECH INDUSTRY  

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Jeffrey Kunkel

Jeffrey Kunkel is an in house web developer for www.lightingnewyork.com. He has been developing for six years, and is excited to start contributing to the ColdFusion community at large.

Jeff has been living with anxiety, depression, and OCD for his entire career. He wants to take the lessons he's learned working around and with these conditions to better the workflow and productivity of his colleagues.

Links

Twitter

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show today we're going to be looking at G ad general anxiety disorder and I am here with Jeffrey Kunkel rhymes with Uncle and we're going to look at why this matters to all cold fusion developers. You may be surprised by how many people this kind of thing effects and we'll talk about anxiety fo mo imposter syndrome. analysis paralysis, being overwhelmed. OCD,

perfectionism. And is anxiety all bad if you're a CF developer. And we'll also look at some solutions. But dealing with this, particularly if you're going to conferences this year, because it's a lot of cold fusion events happening. And that can bring out the worst in the anxiety. So welcome, Jeffrey.

Unknown 0:46

Oh,

Michaela 0:48

hey. And if you don't know him, he's a co founder and developer. He's been one for quite a few years now. And he's just getting more active in the coffee here. community. And this is the first time he's speaking. Yep. Publicly at a conference. So probably your little anxious about the whole talk thing that you're giving on anxiety? It's a bit of a

self referential Yep, they're

Jeffrey Kunkel 1:13

living the experience I'm talking about. Absolutely.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Gavin Pickin talks about “ContentBox in the Cloud (Docker Magic)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

He is one of the speakers at Into The Box 2018 conference.

Show notes

What is ContentBox and why would you want to use it with Docker?

ContentBox is a great Modular CMS built on top of ColdBox

Using CommandBox and Forgebox you can install modules and extend your app in seconds.

You can extend and build on top of ContentBox easily to mold it to your liking.

Interception points

CFCs

It’s just ColdBox MVC under the hood.

Big changes in 3.8 releasing any day now.

themes , modules and widgets now upgrade proof

Docker friendly

Version 4 - maybe at ITB - come and find out.

Env Variable support

CFConfig for loading your CF Engine from scripts

ContentBox docker image

Which has a few extra ContentBox goodies added on top of the usual CommandBox docker image.

File mounts

Special settings

Old School servers vs Docker and CI

Painful to think about old school server

10 page documents of the setup

Using a Docker file mount to be able to share Media files between 2 instances

For images and documents

Persistent storage

A bit a CDN

How to cluster sessions so your ContentBox site can run in the cloud, on more than one instance.

More speed

More reliability

Separated from other sites

Horizontal scale vs vertical scale

Auto scaling with Docker Swarm

Portainer

Couchbase / Redis Extension for Clustered Caching

Elastic Search

ColdBox APIs

Scaling

4 servers high traffic

Travel sites

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into the Box this year?

What other conferences are you going to attend?

Speaking at CF Summit West again - if they pick me - speaker deadline April 15th.

CF Objective on hiatus this year so first time in 6 years I won’t be speaking there

MuraCon in Sacramento early in April.

Waiting for dates NCDevCon - would love to attend this one.

CFCamp - I wish… maybe next year. Brad and Luis will probably be there.

Ortus Developer Week

Ortus Roadshow

ContentBox + Docker

Start to finish, launch your ContentBox site in the cloud with Docker. We will look at the ContentBox docker image, which has a few extra ContentBox goodies added on top of the usual CommandBox docker image. We will learn how to use a file mount to be able to share Media files between 2 instances, and how to cluster sessions so your ContentBox site can run in the cloud, on more than one instance.

Ortus Keynote

The Ortus Keynote gives you insight into Ortus Solutions, the past, present and future.

You'll meet the members of Team Ortus, community members, speakers and sponsors.

We'll tell you a story about CFML, which we think you will want to hear, and learn what Ortus and the community is doing for CFML and the future of CFML.

You will get updates on an array of Ortus *Box products, including recent releases & upcoming plans and features in our roadmaps.

We will finish with Ortus's plans for the future… as well as remind you of a driving force behind all things Ortus.

Alexa and ColdBox APIs

Alexa from Amazon powers the Amazon Echo, Amazon Fire TV and is Amazon's answer to Siri, Cortana and Google home.

Amazon's Alexa Skills Kit allows developers to build their own set of abilities that can be published to the Alexa App Store for consumers to use.

This Session will walk through the pros and cons of voice, how to design a voice user interface, how to get started with ColdBox, and how to design Alexa Commands that integrate with your ColdBox API.

ColdBox Zero to Hero

Full day workshop - sold out

Mentioned in this episode

Gavin’s ITB sessions 

Comprehensive list of ColdFusion conferences

ContentBox episode (with roadmap)

Digital Ocean

Amazon AWS

Google cloud platform

CDN

Using Portainer.io (Docker Container Management) with Neil Cresswell episode

Floating IP

Couchbase

Redis Extension

Elastic Search

GitLab

Continuous Integration

Gulp functions

DevNexus conference

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Gavin Pickin

Gavin Pickin - Software Consultant for Ortus Solutions

Gavin started using ColdFusion in 1999 when working for the university of Auckland in New Zealand before moving to California. He has lead teams, trained new developers and worked the full stack from graphic design, HTML CSS JavaScript through to ColdFusion MySQL and server administration.

Gavin has a passion for learning and cannot understand why the 9-5ers aren't listening to podcasts while changing diapers, watching video tutorials while cleaning baby bottles and folding clothes, or putting the kids to sleep with soothing phone gap mobile application cookbook recipes.

You will find him blogging at gpickin.com and on twitter @gpickin and occasionally being mocked on cfhour's podcast.

Links

Twitter

Website

CFML slack

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show. Today we're going to be looking at using content box in the cloud. And we're going to do some Docker magic with it. And I'm here with Gavin picking. And he is the software consultant for all the solutions. And he's also the guy behind a lot of the content box. Cool stuff. And I think he's been working away on a new release. But we'll ask him about that later in the episode. But first of all, we're going to talk about what content boxes and why you'd want to use it with Docker. And we'll talk about some of the cool new stuff that he's been putting out with the content box Docker image, and using a file mount in order to share media files between multiple instances and how clustering sessions can give you a lot more speed and reliability. We also touch on us support painter and couch based and Elastic Search. So lots of cool stuff in today's episode. So welcome, Gavin. Thank you appreciate having me. So for those people who don't know what is content box,

Gavin Pickin 1:02

so content box is order solutions, very own CMS. So it's a content management system. And we built it on top of CO box. So it's a whole box app and does a lot of the great things you expect from content management systems. And we try to make it bigger and better all the time. The beauty of it is, is that it's modular. And if you've used man box, forge box, and everything else, just like have a co box apps, you can install modules and extending your app, and seconds, you want it to us, you know, be crib free passwords or what not just install the modular if you want to use you know, any other modules, install them in a way you go. They're up and running. And you can use them in seconds. So it builds on top of all the great building blocks that call box and forge box and command box gives you

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Brad Wood talks about “CommandBox 4 Deep Dive (new version revealed)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

He is one of the speakers at Into The Box 2018 conference, a system architect for Ortus Solution and lead developer of the CommandBox CLI.

Show notes

What is CommandBox

Command line utility (CLI)

Windows, Mac, Linux

Manage CF apps and servers from command line

Run CF code from command line

Written in CFML - open source

What if CFML compiler was  

Why all CFers should be using it

State of the CF Union survey 70-80% of CFers use

Productivity especially around managing multiple server versions

Very fast spin up a new server for testing (< 30 seconds)

Auto download the install WAR file

Any dot version

Free (open source)

What is new in version 4

In snapshot since Dec 2017 (beta test)

New underpinnings

Lucee CFML 5

Faster Lucee start up times

Lots of new features from Lucee 5 that you can use in CommandBox now

Follows JSR 223 standard

256 color support (vs 8)

Bullet Train is now built in (vs module)

Tab completion - updated JLine - highlight of commands as you type

REPL syntax highlighting

Better ^C support - commands are interruptible

^D total shell exit

Better class loading

Better terminal support - conemu

Still free

Paid support

Private packages via ForgeBox

Private S3 repository

Usage Overview

Review help system

Add Help at end of command to get specific help

Git book tutorial

Samples for each command

Demo REPL and uses

Learn about scaffolding commands

Auto generate framework and test code

Using shell history, tab completion, and config settings

Native scripting with CFML

Running .cfm files from your CLI as Task Runners

A CFC with function Run()

Run from command line or cron job

Send emails, access files, process data

Automate Git, Maven etc

Extend Jenkins continuous integration

Using a database in a stand-alone cfm script

Server Management

Start/stop servers

Multi-engine support (Adobe, Lucee, etc)

Manage servers

Handling CF configuration with CFConfig

Script it

Version control of server config

Externalize passwords for datasources and S3 etc

Server.json between ACF and Lucee and version

Using CommandBox for cloud deployments (Heroku, Docker)

Package Management and Authoring

What is ForgeBox.io

Find and install packages

ColdBox, F/W 1, Mura etc

Update packages

Creating a package

Travis automated testing of packages in multiple CF versions

Package scripts

Creating a ForgeBox account

Publish a package to ForgeBox

List libraries that I am using

Outdated command - are any new libraries available

Extending CommandBox

Creating a Module

What are modules

How to use Interceptors

Hook into key events in CommandBox as they start or end

Packing a model inside a module

Distributing your work for the world to see on ForgeBox

Exercise Time

Let’s build something!

Work in teams or alone to create a module that does something cool and publish it to ForgeBox and Github.

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at ITB?

Brad’s sessions

Integrating MVC into legacy

Ortus Keynote

Thinking Modularly

WireBox Basics (Dependency Injection)

Take your CF apps from local dev to production with CommandBox and CFConfig and Docker

CommandBox Deep Dive

ColdBox Zero to Hero workshop sold out

More of the basics as well as advanced stuff

Workshop Description

This workshop will start with the basics of using CommandBox CLI in your everyday workflow.  We’ll focus on topics like managing servers, package management, and scripting command line tasks using CFML and Task Runners.  We’ll also cover extending the CommandBox core with modules to add your own behaviours. We will focus on hands-on exercises and will end the day with each student building their own module and publishing it to ForgeBox.

Prerequisites

A working knowledge of CommandBox’s shell and basic commands is desirable but not required

Have the latest stable version of CommandBox installed already

A GitHub account and Git CLI installed (if you want to follow along with publishing packages)

Agenda

Introductions/checking prerequisites - 15 mins

Usage Overview - 45 mins

Native scripting with CFML - 1 hr

Server Management - 1 hr

Lunch - 1 hr

Package Management and Authoring - 1 hr

Extending CommandBox - 1 hr

Break - 30 mins

Exercise Time - 1.5 hr

Listen to the Audio

Mentioned in this episode

CommandBox download

Into The Box 2018 Conference

Wirebox

REPL = Read Eval Print Loop

Conemu - better Windows terminal

Other windows terminals 

Jenkins continuous integration

RaspberryPi

Travis

F/W 1

CFWheels

Preside CMS

Bio

Brad Wood

Brad grew up in southern Missouri and after high school majored in Computer Science with a music minor at MidAmerica Nazarene University (Olathe, KS). Today he lives in Kansas City with his wife and three girls. Brad enjoys all sorts of international food and the great outdoors.

Brad has been programming ColdFusion since 2001 and has used every version of CF since 4.5. He first fell in love with ColdFusion as a way to easily connect a database to his website for dynamic pages. He enjoys configuring and performance tuning high-availability Windows and Linux ColdFusion environments as well as SQL Server. Brad is the ColdBox Platform developer advocate at Ortus Solutions and lead developer of the CommandBox CLI.

Links

CFML Slack Box Channel

Twitter

Brad

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Brad wood. And we're going to talk about the new release of command box for cold fusion. And he's giving a deep dive on that are into the box and all day workshop all about it. And today we'll have a look at what Come on box is and how you use it. And why you use it while cold fusion users using it, how you can write scripts using command box to like create batch files, I guess in effect

will look how you can use it for server management. some really cool things it does. They're automatically downloading different versions of Adobe or Lucy cold fusion.

Also, we'll look at package management and how you can use it for creating things there, and how you can extend command box with your own commands. So welcome, Brad.

Unknown 0:53

Thank you.

Brad Wood 0:54

Glad to be here. And yeah, I haven't seen you for at least a few months.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Nolan Erck talks about “Font Awesome and ColdFusion (never build icons again)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Tired of having to make "delete", "edit", "new", "save", "confirm", and "purchase" icons for your clients? In 3 different sizes (desktop, tablet, mobile)? And new versions for each color scheme you use? Enter Font Awesome!  Font Awesome gives you scalable vector icons, that are totally customizable, all by just including a CSS file in your project. It's free, compatible with current devices and browsers, easy to use and customize to your liking.  Font Awesome is compatible with Bootstrap, various other frameworks, screen readers, retina displays and cuts down the time you spend doing "boilerplate" work in PhotoShop for every project!

Target Audience: Designers and CF developers that are tired of having to rebuild the same icons for every project.  Attendees should know some basic HTML and CSS, no further programming or PhotoShop skills are required.

Show notes

What is Font Awesome

A vector based CSS font that you can use in CF apps that displays icons without graphic files

Why should CF developers care?

Auto sizing for desktop, tablet and mobile

Easy to change the look and feel in code - no need to go back to a graphic designer.

Display or change icons in code (JavaScript)

Faster page loading.

100s of commonly used icons included

Vector based graphics - no pixelation on zooming

Pricing

Free open source version

900+ icons

Automated Accessibility

Paid version with themes $60/year

500+ more icons

Font CDN

Subset only the icons you need into a custom font

Version 5

Demo

The tag “icon” - overrides the old meaning of italic

Treating icons like fonts - changing sizes and colors, applying styles

Bordered, spinning and rotated icons

Stacked icons

Divs

Float

Rotating icons

Installing Font Awesome

Add one line of javascript to your header code.

CSS Lint

Documentation

Online docs

Blog

Support (paid version)

How does it work with Bootstrap?

No problem

Pros and cons of Font Awesome

Pros

Saves grunt work

Better UX

No pixelation

Responsive ready

Faster site

Cons

30 Mb download to install on website (vs CDN)

A 700k file overhead on Free version

Paid Subscription (on Pro version)

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box

Mentioned in this episode

Font Awesome 

MuraCMS (ColdFusion Content Management System) used Font Awesome in the admin screen

Into The Box conference 

MuraCon - dev and marketing (digital experience) tracks 

ColdFusion conferences roundup 

Demo code 

CSS Lint tools

Link 1

Link 2

Preso and demo

Jazz conference 

a 3-day event, March 21-23, 2018, on Web & JavaScript Development! All tickets include workshop day, and there will be 4 concurrent tracks. Workshops and sessions include:

Angular,

React,

Vue,

JavaScript,

JS Frameworks,

HTML5,

CSS3, 

tools, techniques.

This is not a mega-conf - rather it is an intimate event with less than 250 attendees

Ray Camden

Simon McDonald

Jessica Kennedy

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Nolan Erck

Chief consultant at South of Shasta

Nolan Erck has been developing software for 19 years. Starting in the video game industry working on titles for Maxis and LucasArts, then advancing to web development in 1999, his list of credits includes Grim Fandango, StarWars Rogue Squadron, SimPark, SimSafari as well as high-traffic websites for clients. Nolan manages the SacInteractive User Group, teaches classes on aspects of software development, and regularly gives presentations at conferences and user groups across the country.

Links

Twitter

GitHub

Interview transcript

Michaela:        Today, we’re looking at Font Awesome and ColdFusion and how you can never have to build icons for your apps again and we're here with Nolan Erck. And he is the founder of. South of Shasta productions.

Nolan:             South of Shasta Consulting.

Michaela:        South of Shasta Consulting?

Nolan:             yes

Michaela:        Consulting! He's like an expert ColdFusion consultant and he's always speaking at different conferences. In fact, he’s gonna be speaking I think in like five or six conferences this year including ‘Into the Box’ which we’ll talk about a bit more later.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Logan Mayville talks about “Marketing Dark Arts for ColdFusion developers (FB Advanced Audience Creation and Tracking)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

 

Show notes

Marketing best practices

How marketing strategy is different from Google AdWords (push vs pull)

Ungated value for free (paid

FB: Give - give - ask/offer

Google: ask

Replace “sell” with “give”

Multi-touch even before email

How to find your target audiences on Facebook

Turn cold audiences warm by building trust and authority with content

Advanced retargeting strategies to convert warm audiences into leads

FB pixel and retargeting

9 standard tracking events → infinity events with Google tag manager

Google tag manager

Scroll depth

Button clicks

Video plays

Time on site

The key to success

Audience (re)targeting

Different messaging

Ad creative tips and tricks

Mobile > desktop

Sponsored content vs ads

Eye catching (not FB blue)

One thought < 90 characters

Sell the “click” not your product

Literal headline

Landing pages and ads need to work together

Ad scent - does the ad and landing page feel the same

Google s

Lead generation for enterprise and B2B

Marketplace over-saturated with ads

Use to accelerate existing B2B lead gen system

Information architecture of the site. Page goals

Holistic strategy encompassing content marketing and personalization

Pain points > actions (6-8 touches before ask)

Negative keyword to eliminate research clicks in expensive PPC

Social identity protocol

FB quasi monopoly on your social identity

Network Switching cost

Privacy and FB data breaches

Cambridge Analytica

Targeting and creepy advertising

FB privacy scandal

Political FB marketing

FB experiments on the content you see

Echo chambers

More polarizing of the voters

$350million fundraiser from small donors

Look-a-like

Tripwire to upsell

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

Awareness and pain

What are you looking forward to at MuraCon?

Mentioned in this episode

Google and Facebook account for more than 63% of digital ad spending

FB is worth more than Exxon - data is more valuable than oil

Google tag manager

MuraCon

Marketing funnel

Cambridge Analytica scandal

FB ending the relationship with third-party data providers Axxon and Experidian

Article: Facebook is running experiments on you 

Last year Ardath Albee book

Park Howell keynote

Listen to the Audio

His Session Description:

Topic:

The 2018 Guide to Facebook Advertising for Lead Generation.

In 2017, global digital ad spending ($209 billion) surpassed television ($178 billion) for the first time. In the U.S., Google and Facebook account for more than 63% of digital ad spending. But in addition to huge brands using their ad spend on digital instead of TV, Facebook has actually seen a renaissance in direct response marketing. But what about lead generation for enterprise and B2B? Can you sell on Facebook?  

In short, yes. But in a marketplace over-saturated with ads, a holistic strategy encompassing content marketing and personalization in conjunction with display advertising has never been more important for lead generation. Savvy marketers looking to use Facebook ads for lead generation need to replace “sell” with “give” and let the business roll downhill from there.In this presentation, Logan will demonstrate:

How to find your target audiences on Facebook

Turn cold audiences warm by building trust and authority with content

Advanced retargeting strategies to convert warm audiences into leads

Bio

Logan Mayville

Logan Mayville is a digital marketing consultant for Southwestern Consulting specializing in direct-response initiatives like lead generation and e-commerce. As a certified Facebook advertising buyer and content strategist, he believes in the power of digital marketing to transform companies in terms of marketing ROI, sales, and customer service. Based in Sacramento, CA, Logan enjoys various mountain-related activities when he’s not helping grow businesses.

Links

www.southwesternconsulting.com

LinkedIn

Twitter

Interview transcript

Michaela:          Welcome back to the show. Today, we're going to go deep into the marketing dark arts for ColdFusion developers with Facebook advanced audience creation and tracking and I'm here with Logan Mayville. And he is speaking at Muracon in the digital experience tracked. (I think remember that right.) And we're gonna look at how Facebook strategy is different from Google Ad Words; totally different way of doing things.

And what the keys to that are. And also, we’ll look at some creative tips and tricks you can use in advertising your products and services and how lead generation for enterprising B2B can be done using this as well. And we'll also look at privacy and some of the Facebook data breaches that have being in the news recently. And some of the creepy advertising that goes on and how that works and what you could do about it. So welcome Logan.

Logan: Yeah, thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Michaela:          And just in case you don't know Logan, he is a digital marketing consultant for Southwestern consulting and he specializes in direct response niche tips for lead generation and e-commerce. And he has done work together with Shawn at Mura. So Blue River Mura. So let's just come back to that. How is Facebook so different from Google Ad Words? Because a lot of people are familiar with using Google Ad Words and using that to generate traffic to their site or maybe they had to work together with a marketing team in their company to do this. But Facebook is quite a different animal.

Logan:              Yes and so the strategy you use is quite different. So the basic differences is that Google ad result we call poll marketing. You already know what the person wants because you've established their intent to their search. So basically, you're in the middle of what they're looking for and you can just slide your product, your service in front of them with a well-placed ad. Facebook is totally different. It's push marketing which is like interruption marketing as familiar with like radio and T.V., right. We don't necessarily know… The persons are looking for us, we just kind of jam an ad in front of them and hope for the best. Now of course the better you are with targeting, the more relevant your ad will be hopefully. So that's a key distinction.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Charlie Arehart talks about “More you missed from Adobe ColdFusion 10, 11, And 2016” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Are you moving up to CF2016, or maybe 11? In doing so, are you skipping over 11, or perhaps even 10, in that move?

Shops often drag their feet upgrading from one version of CF to another and may well skip multiple releases in the process, so that they may not have paid attention to what was new in the release(s) skipped. Can you name the top 5 or 10 features/changes in these three most recent releases?

In this presentation, veteran CFer Charlie Arehart will help fill these gaps for you, highlighting the top features of 10, 11, and 2016, along with some hidden gems. (Whereas his classic "hidden gems" talks have gone deep to uncover a few dozen features per release, this talk will necessarily focus on just some key ones.) With demos and resources for learning more, you'll be in a better position to take full advantage of your new CF installation.

Show notes

What are the top features CFers may have missed

Isn’t CF10 end of life?

Yes but lots of people still running it (or CF9) ← security risk!

State of CF Union Survey

With CF 2018 about to come out why should CFers care about these “old” features?

JVM changes - in CF 10 and forward

JRUN → Tomcat

Cloud deployment shifts

The Elvis operator

100% cfscript is possible as of CF 11

No day zero security issues for 4+ years

CF Summit East

Dual track

10 speakers

http://carahevents.carahsoft.com/CFSummit2018/Speakers

http://blogs.coldfusion.com/adobe-coldfusion-summit-east-in-washington-d-c-on-april-25/

Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel

999 Ninth Street NW

CF conferences in DC

Allaire DevCon 2000

CFUnited-08

20th anniversary of first CF conf in FT Collins CO Robi Sen

CFUN in NIH

Mentioned in this episode

The State of the CF Union survey 2018 

CF Alive Charlie episode on CF 10, 11 and 2016 missed features

CF Alive Mike Collins CF Scaling episode

Charlie’s forum post about “CF 2016 It Works!” 

“I'm not aware of any issues with CF2016 specifically, affecting some large percentage of folks moving to it, which should lead someone to conclude that they should not move to CF2016”

Charlie’s blog post CF 10 updater help 

Charlie Arehart's Ultimate List of 200+ New ColdFusion 10 Features 

ColdFusion 11 New Functions and Tags 

ColdFusion 11 Hidden Gems 

ColdFusion 2016 What is new 

ColdFusion 2016 Hidden Gems 

Adobe products End of Life and Release dates 

CF10 End of Life 5/16/2017

CF 11 End of Life 4/30/2019

ColdFusion EULA

All of Charlie’s presentations (over 100!)

CF2016: What's deprecated and/or 'no longer supported' (note: nothing 'removed') 

With the Update of ColdFusion 9 to ColdFusion 11 the underlying chart engine changed from WebCharts3D to ZingCharts

Adobe bug tracker 

CF-oriented Troubleshooting Consultants 

CF-oriented Application Development Consultants 

Beyond the CFML reference - the developers guide 3000 pages developing cf applications

The first CF event at NIH was called the DCCFUC (DC CF User Conference) - see the bottom of 

Charlie’s talk there 

Charlie’s blog post about some pre-history of CFUnited 

Allaire ColdFusion DevCon in Boston in 99

The FT Collins CF DevCon

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Charlie Arehart

A veteran server troubleshooter who’s worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart (@carehart) is a longtime community contributor who as an independent consultant provides short-term, remote, on-demand troubleshooting/tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes and experience levels (carehart.org/consulting).

Links

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Website

Interview transcript

Michaela:         Welcome back to the show. And today, we're gonna be looking at what you may have missed in C.F. 10, 11, and 2016 with Charlie Arehart. And if you don't know Charlie which I find hard to believe because everyone knows Charlie in the C.F. world. He is a veteran ColdFusion trouble shooter. He's been doing it since like the first version came out and he's been an I.T. wizard for like more than three decades now I think. But right now, he helps out people with their ColdFusion servers.

So when they're sick or not doing what they should be doing. And what we’ll look at today is something you may not have considered. There may be bunch of features in older versions of ColdFusion that are still in the version of ColdFusion used today that you don't even know about. So we’ll talk about that. And we'll also talk about C.F. Summit East where Charlie will be speaking. And if we had a chance, we'll reminisce about some of the other conferences in Washington D.C. So welcome Charlie.

Charlie:            Hey there! Thanks for doing this as always. It's great that you do that for the community.

Michaela:         You’re so welcome. So isn't ColdFusion 10 gone end of life? Why would anyone care what features were in C.F. 10?

Charlie:            Sure, sure, so you know and that's reasonable question. The point of the presentation is that as I've been helping people over the past several years ten years, 20 years now. And I'm sure you can attest to this yourself that people don't migrate up as quickly as the new releases come out. So there are people that today are still running on C.F. 9 or, and here's the bigger point. They say, “Well I'm on nine anymore. I've moved up to 11 or 2016.” Well often they will have skipped let's say ten. And so ten was such a watershed release compared to nine or earlier ten and later are quite different because nine on earlier ran on JRun and ten and later on Tomcat. So I just use that as a marking point to say for anybody that maybe jumped from nine or earlier to ten or later, these are things to be aware of.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Bret Fisher talks about “The Docker Revolution for Faster ColdFusion Development (and Easier DevOps)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Docker containers have revolutionized much of how we build, ship, and run the software.

Bret will highlight the far-reaching effects of this pivotal technology and how it's blazing a trail for the future of app development and deployment.

5 birthday of Docker

300 meetups

The key benefits for choosing to deploy CF and Mura on the Docker toolset

Developers

Docker for Mac or Windows runs Linux Docker containers

Build

CI and CD

CIDE

Docker Build tool

YAML file that describes your app

Docker Compose

DevOps

CD = Continuous Deployment

Agile deployments

Docker image package format

Code, config and all its dependencies

Docker hub

AWS elastic container service

Orchestration

SHA-1 hashed for security

Windows 2016 has Docker support built in

Downsides to Docker

Learning curve, new concepts.

Make it a goal to replace a tool, not add to your tool list

The dev-staging-prod pipeline

Basic "daily docker commands" for working with software on your machine.

Go to store.Docker.com to get current and correct install instructions for your version of Windows, Linux etc

Docker compose command line

Docker compose up and down

CommandBox

Commit to version control

CI tool (eg Jenkins) → continuous testing → green light (passes all tests)

Push good image to container registry

Keeps old versions (via diffs only)

Tagged images

Pull down to staging or production and run

Local dev environment benefits

Consistency

between devs

between dev and prod

Isolation of different CF versions etc for different projects

Faster set up for new devs on team or new projects

From 12 page set up a guide to 1 page

Can run Linux or Windows CF

A platform of tools for devs and DevOps

Docker-Machine to manage local and cloud containers

Docker Swarm (built into Docker)

Your existing cloud vendor’s Docker tools

DO simplicity

Docker is pre-installed for droplets

Docker Machine driver built in

AWS - lots of features and tools

3 different Docker deploy options

ACS is easiest

Microsoft Azure new features

CommandBox

Why are you proud to use Docker?

WWIT to make Docker more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at MuraCon?

Mentioned in this episode

Docker for Windows or Mac 

Docker Build 

YAML file

Kubernetes

Netflix Chaos Monkey

Docker Swarm 

Portainer episode

Rancher

CNCF Diagram of  container ecosystem  

Awesome Docker  

Code for America

DockerCon in US and EU

CommandBox

Bret’s slides 

Bret’s Udemy Docker course 

Bret’s YouTube Docker videos 

Bret’s GitHub Docker AMA 

Session Descriptions

How Docker is Changing IT

Docker containers are a 5-year old project that has revolutionized much of how we build, ship, and run software. Bret will highlight the far-reaching effects of this pivotal technology and how it's blazing a trail for the future of app development and deployment.

Workshop: Intro to Docker & Containers

This fast-paced hands-on workshop will take you from Docker 101 to an understanding of how to use Docker Compose for easy local Mura development. You'll learn which Docker edition is right for you and your laptop OS, and get it working in the workshop (if you don't already have it). Bret will teach you some basic "daily docker commands" for working with software on your machine. You'll get plenty of background on the "what, why, and how" on Docker for development while getting your hands dirty running and managing containers.

Journey to Docker Production

Bret and Eddie will take you through many of the factors that will help you be successful in creating a production-ready Docker server cluster, including Docker best practices and Docker Swarm infrastructure templates. They'll show off some example configurations specific to Mura, as well as complementary solutions that will be necessary for production. You'll take away some key benefits for choosing to deploy Mura on the Docker toolset.

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Bret Fisher

For 25 years Bret has built and operated distributed systems as a Sysadmin and helped over 30,000 people learn dev and ops topics. He is a Docker Captain, the author of the wildly popular Docker Mastery series on Udemy, and also provides DevOps style consulting and live workshops with a focus on immutable infrastructures, containers, and orchestration. Bret's an occasional shell and web, and JavaScript developer. He spends his free time in Virginia's local, thriving tech scene helping lead local Code for America and Docker Meetups. Bret basically spends his days helping people, and giving high fives. He lives at the beach, writes at bretfisher.com, prefers dogs over cats, and tweets at @bretfisher

Links

Bretfisher.com

Twitter

GitHub

Interview Transcript

Michaela:        Welcome back to the show. And today, we're going to look at the Docker revolution for faster ColdFusion and easier devops with Bret Fisher. And we're going to look at the revolution in how we build ship and run software using Docker containerization. And some of the key [inaudible] [00:18] benefits of choosing Docker to deploy your ColdFusion apps. And Bret is going to be speaking at Miracon in a few weeks. So in particular, we’ll focus on the Miracon CMS that's written in ColdFusion. But all that stuff applies to any ColdFusion app. And we'll look at some of the downsides of ColdFusion. We’ll look at the your dev stage of production pipeline, how you might set up your local dev environment with Docker Best, and some of the tools you can use.

We’ll mention Docker Compose and we’ll have a talk about some of the basic daily Docker commands that would be really good to know. So lot more things coming up in this episode. We'll see what we can fit in here because if you don't know, Bret is a Docker captain and he is author of one of the most popular Udemy courses on Docker, and has some great YouTube videos on setting yourself up in Docker. So he's a real Docker expert and he loves to give high fives to people. And he's speaking at about 12 conferences including Miracon in the next three months. So welcome Bret.

Bret:                Thanks for having me. Yes, it is. It should be the Bret world tour I believe at this point. So it's going to be a lot of fun.

Michaela:        Excellent! So tell us a bit about the Docker revolution in building and deploying and running software?

Read more

💡 Pro Tips from Bret Fisher

Start small, experiment locally, and gradually bring Docker into your workflow.

Use official Docker documentation for the latest setup instructions for your OS.

Consider resources like Bret’s Udemy Docker course and YouTube videos for hands-on learning.

🎤 Final Thought: The Modern ColdFusion Stack Is Containerized

If your CF project is business-critical, using Docker isn’t just “nice to have” – it’s how you protect your app, your job, and your sanity.

For more best practices, don’t forget to grab the CF Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Want to go deeper?

👉 Listen to the full episode for Bret’s stories, tips, and Docker war stories.

Ready to modernize your ColdFusion workflow? Drop your biggest Docker question below or reach out to the teratech.community!

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.